Course Descripton and Competencies:
This course introduces students to the study of disease and ill health through their patterns of occurrence in human populations. The approaches of epidemiology in estimating the burden of disease‚ in making inferences about cause of disease‚ and in evaluating primary‚ secondary and tertiary prevention strategies are presented. Upon completion of the course, the student will be able to:

Explain the importance of epidemiology for informing scientific, ethical, economic and political discussion of health issues.

Describe a public health problem in terms of magnitude, person, time and place.

Apply the basic terminology and definitions of epidemiology.

Identify key sources of data for epidemiologic purposes, such as vital statistics and disease registries.

Recognize specific features of different study designs and identify their respective strengths and weaknesses.

Calculate basic epidemiologic measures.

Recognize the variable quality of epidemiologic reports and understand that not all associations are causal.